


vermouth, visitors & the void

by Previously8



Series: mere anarchy at the end of the world [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst and Humor, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Minor Character Death, Sort Of, and therefore gets her princess in shining armour, rose is sad but luckily she is also a lesbian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:21:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23992930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Previously8/pseuds/Previously8
Summary: The first person Rose sees after the apocalypse happens, in all its fiery doom and nuclear glory, is her mother.Or, how to live on after the end of the world when your house is a morgue, your mother is a drunk, and there's an interesting and beautiful stranger at the door.(Can be read independently of the first fic in the series (runs parallel to cereal, cities & cynics))
Relationships: Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Series: mere anarchy at the end of the world [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1717285
Comments: 16
Kudos: 55





	vermouth, visitors & the void

**Author's Note:**

> wooo so here's what happened to Rose during and after the apocalypse!! for more details on what the apocalypse was like, head to the first fic, because the worldbuilding happens there-- but you definitely don't need it to understand this (lack of?) plot. this is just rose and kanaya meeting after everything has been blown up. the good stuff. very vague and atmospheric :P
> 
> Warnings for: alcohol abuse/alcoholism (rose's mom), blood, vaguely disturbing imagery though not gruesome

The first person Rose sees after the apocalypse happens, in all its fiery doom and nuclear glory, is her mother. 

She stumbles in from the lab in her white coat, legs twisting and flailing like a badly controlled puppet—she can’t walk at all in a straight line, and Rose wonders if she’s even aware of what has happened outside. Her mother plants herself face-first onto the large leather couch in their living room, swats the remote until the TV turns on to a talk show, and falls fast asleep. Rose watches the spectacle, nothing new, from the top of the stairs, half-hidden behind a wizard statue. She used to think this particular wizard looked like he was scolding her, frowning under his large pointed hat, but since then she’s decided that she doesn’t care. 

Once her mother starts to snore in earnest, Rose creeps down the stairs as nonchalantly as she can, and heads to the fridge. She grabs an apple and starts to head back upstairs when her mother stirs—odd, because she is usually too tired and too drunk when she gets home. Rose is caught, faced with a conversation that she has no interest in partaking in. 

Her mother stumbles to the kitchen and pours herself a shot of vodka, which she shoots back. She finally catches sight of Rose, who is now leaning casually against the counter, after the second has made its way down her throat. She frowns down at her daughter. 

“Rose?” She slurs, waving a hand unsteadily in Rose’s direction and leaning back against the counter. She squints at her daughter. “You should go to sh-sleep. It-itsh late.”

It’s the most words her mother has said to her in days, maybe weeks. Rose isn’t sure how to respond, so she goes with her standard response of staring her mother down disapprovingly instead of saying anything. She takes a bite of her apple. Her mother pours herself a glass of red wine from yet another open bottle on the counter and holds it, slightly lopsided so the wine nearly tips out when she gestures with it. “Stop being so sherious,” she complains, “live a little, Rosie.”

Rose does not want to live a little. She wants her mother to leave the room. 

Her wish, it seems, has been heard: her mother sashays away, ignoring the purple specks of red wine dripping onto the cream carpet that covers the floor towards the stairs. Her mother doesn’t turn to say goodbye, and Rose is pretty sure her mother has forgotten she is there at all. Rose takes another decisive bite out of her apple once her mother has left, and goes on the hunt for something crunchy, like pretzels, so she can break them with her teeth like they were animal bones and she an owl, or a porcupine. 

The next time that she sees her mother is almost a week later. She’s sprawled on the floor of her favourite room in the house, her wine glass sitting empty on the ground next to her, as though she has just sat down to take a nap, albeit on a checker tile floor that can’t be comfortable. There are many more empty bottles on the long bar counter, standing or lying in puddles of sticky alcoholic spill. It’s far from Rose's favourite room, with the way the bottles form rows of spectators along the walls, glinting oddly in the weak light, a thousand eyes and a thousand mirrors. 

Her mother is not breathing.

There’s nothing to be done about that, she supposes. Rose moves on. 

She closes the door and goes back to her room. She tidies it up, though not much was out of place to begin with. There is only a small amount of light that comes in through her narrow window, but she doesn’t turn on the lamp, to preserve what little electricity her generator can offer. Once her quilt is nice and neat, her pillows plump, and her books arranged by colour and then by preference, she leaves her room again, this time with the door open for the first time in years. 

The house is quiet, but the house is always quiet. Her mother is always in the lab or snoring in a soundproofed room: It’s rare to have any sound break the silence except for the gentle tap of her own feet against the tiles or the marble stairs. She wanders the halls, taking in every piece of the house from a distance, like a clinical observer of a troubled patient. 

Most of the building’s main security features are still in place: there are strong bars reinforcing the window panes and around the doors to every room. Metal shutters can be drawn over every exit except the main one, which is thick enough to lead to a vault rather than an untended lawn, anyway, and needed no further reinforcement. Rose knows the codes to all of them of course, but she relishes the safety that it gives her, to stay inside like this. The windows are made of a bulletproof, heatproof transparent material (like glass but better, her mother had proclaimed, back when she was still capable of being sober) so unlike most bunkers she has a good view of the eerie outside. She sits there, on the purple leather couch in the living room, with a martini glass of orange juice.

Outside looks normal: the trees still stand though they are cast in an unfriendly orange glow by the swirling clouds. The news, before the broadcasts stopped, suggested that though the nuclear damages would be permanent and many buildings destroyed, the levels of radiation would decrease rapidly after the attacks, allowing for livable air soon enough. Rose was not so foolish as to believe them at a time when the world was most desperate to hear reassuring news. Any exterior life would have been completely destroyed, she thinks, but sea life might have survived. She wonders if others had bunkers, too. She ponders the gaping hole of aloneness: just her and the eldritch, under a too-warm sun, the world irradiated and unlivable. 

As the thought crosses her mind, a resounding knock rings on the door. 

The thing, of course, about living in the middle of the wilderness in the Northeastern United States, is that no one comes knocking. Not even the postman, though Rose had never been sure if that was intentional on her mother’s part, because all post was redirected to the lab, or because they were just too far for the U.S. Postal Service to bother. She hasn’t had a visitor in years. In fact, Rose hasn't had the company of another human being since her graduation from grade school to a self-directed leaning environment at the age of ten. 

She thinks long and hard before opening the door, by which Rose means that she decides that nothing out there, not even the radiation, could be worse than sitting in the impenetrable fortress of a mansion she finds herself in. The series of unfathomably complex locks clicks open, one by one, and the door swings silently on its hinges. A blast of warm air greets her, stale like dust and sour like unripe fruit. 

There is a young woman on her doorstep. 

She is wearing a long black skirt and a turtleneck, as well as a very stylish pair of red boots that are covered in dust. She is taller than Rose—not that Rose has much time to notice, because the woman, who had been leaning against the door in exhaustion, promptly swoons into Rose’s arms, completely unconscious. 

Rose drags her inside, depositing her on the plush, wine-stained cream carpet near their glass coffee table, and closes the door again. The woman doesn’t move when Rose returns to consider her. She is indeed wearing a long black skirt, and her hair is stylishly coiffed. Her nails, long and gleaming, are delicately manicured. Rose wonders how she managed to acquire a New York socialite unconscious on her carpet, despite being miles and miles from the nearest inhabited area. 

The woman is also very beautiful. 

Rose, self-professed lesbian extraordinaire, is not in fact sure what one is supposed to do with a swooning maiden who appears on your doorstep. She had long since discounted the possibility, after all. It seems to Rose a bit too late to invite her in to tea, though she supposes she can offer when the woman wakes up. She fetches a pillow and lifts the woman’s head onto it gently. She is most definitely breathing, which is a relief on Rose’s end, because she really doesn’t need another corpse in the house. One is already more than enough. 

She sits, and waits, and watches the body. 

The sunset outside paints the whole room a garish red when the girl’s breathing quickens, and then evens out abruptly. Rose studies her more carefully over a mug of tea. 

Is she… glowing?

Rose rubs her eyes, and double checks her vision, perfectly willing to dismiss it as a side effect of her short exposure to the still very high levels of radiation outside. When everything comes back into focus, however, the woman is still glowing slightly, a pale radiance glimmering under her porcelain skin in the growing darkness. Rose realizes, with startling clarity, that this is probably not due to her own exposure to radiation, but the beautiful stranger’s. This is reassuring and not.

She fetches her laptop and does her research.

There is nothing conclusive. The internet, in its meddled entirety, has no answers. All the websites, of course, are just their preserved versions from just over a week ago, during the total nuclear meltdown and subsequent obliteration of several states off the map. There have been no updates since, and certainly none on any of the medical websites that could have informed her that her stranger certainly had a rare form of cancer, much less a common one. Rose is lucky to have stable electricity thanks to the generator and the hydroelectrical dam her house is built on, but she presumes many do not. 

She has just come to this conclusion when the woman on the floor’s breathing picks up again. Rose puts her laptop to the side-- just in time, as the woman wakes up and jumps to her feet in one fluid motion. Her eyes, green like emeralds, are trained on Rose, who feels especially underdressed in an old T-shirt and leggings. 

“Where am I?” the woman asks, looking around, though she keeps one eye on Rose at all times. 

“You’re in my house,” Rose tells her. The woman’s eyes snap back to her and Rose can feel a small flush rise to her cheeks. Determined not to be bested simply by the woman’s beauty, she continues, “you knocked on my door last night and collapsed.”

The woman seems startled. “My apologies,” she says and promptly sways. She sits down on the couch, puts one hand to her forehead. 

Rose stares at her. “Could you perhaps explain why you are glowing?”

The woman stares down at her hands, and then at her reflection in the long windows that go all the way around the room. It’s almost fully dark outside, but Rose has turned on two lamps, making the reflections eerie mimics of the real situation. The woman’s unnatural glow is even more obvious in her reflection, her skin radiating a slight white haze, making the features in her reflection difficult to distinguish. 

The woman doesn’t answer Rose’s question immediately. When Rose coughs politely to remind her of where and when she is, the woman startles slightly, and her gaze refocuses on Rose. 

“I believe I am ill,” she says, and looks down at her hands in her lap once more. With most of the rest of her skin covered, her hands are the most easily observable. 

“Infectious?” Rose asks mildly. If she must die so soon, she figures dying in the arms of a lovely glowing stranger is hardly a miserable way to do so. 

“No,” the woman says. “It’s a side effect of the radiation.”

“Radiation doesn’t usually cause glowing,” Rose tells her. She knows the theoretical symptoms of radiation sickness: blistered skin and a high temperature, rapid tumour growth, the works. 

“I also have a genetic condition,” the woman adds, as an afterthought. She doesn’t ask Rose how she knows what the symptoms of radiation sickness are. 

“Glowing.”

“Expressing certain fluorescent genes when the body is under extreme stress,” the woman corrects, still staring at her hands. “Likely the reason I made it here at all.” She sways slightly, braces herself with one hand on the seat as though trying to keep herself from falling. It doesn’t work, and she falls sideways across the couch into a slumber once more. 

Rose stares at her for a few seconds, and then goes to make tea.

It takes only an hour for her to rouse this time and shakily climb into a sitting position. She accepts the tea gratefully. 

“May I ask your name?” she inquires after they have sat in silence for a while. 

Rose, whose attention had drifted to the blank darkness out the window, jumps slightly. She tells the woman, “Rose Lalonde,” and watches to see if the name sparks recognition. It doesn’t seem to, which is a relief, but also begs the question what she was doing so far from the nearest town in the first place. “And you are?”

“Kanaya,” she says, “Maryam.”

“And what was a woman such as yourself doing so far from civilization without a vehicle, a week after the apocalypse?” Rose asks. She had checked: there was a small bag of essentials on her front doorstep, presumably the woman’s, which she brought in. Besides that, the only sign that she had come at all were a set of footprints in the thin layer of dust on the ground that lead out of the woods and to her front steps. Curious. 

Kanaya seems to blush slightly under her still glowing skin. “I got lost,” she admits. 

“Lost,” Rose repeats. “In the woods, fifty miles from the nearest inhabitant.”

“Well,” Kanaya clarifies, “we were on a road trip of sorts, and we were between towns. It is possible we were as far as 50 miles away, though I walked here in two once I saw the lights in the woods.” 

Interesting. Rose had only survived because her house was a bomb shelter of the kind that doomsday preppers lusted after, and certainly protected from something as piddly as radiation. The idea that others might have lived to see the morning after hadn’t crossed her mind as more than a fleeting thing, and she hadn’t had time to consider the fact that her home, with its large windows and bright lights, could act as a beacon in the dark. 

Another important part of Kanaya’s story sticks out, “you were with someone.”

“My--friend,” Kanaya says, though she doesn’t sound sure. “Though she is most probably long gone, maybe to the grave.”

There’s a particular quality to the way that Kanaya says the words, one that reminds Rose very acutely of her own apathy towards the body in her basement. 

So, instead of pressing further, though she wants to, she offers, “would you like something to eat?”

Kanaya accepts. 

The second person that Rose meets after the apocalypse, as Rose finds out over the course of a long conversation, was once a fashion design student, had been living abroad for the past two years, and had just returned home when the apocalypse happened. Since then, she’d been traveling with an old friend (or something, but Rose only has seconds to try to understand the tone of Kanaya’s voice as she says the word), but had run into very few other people. They had weathered the nuclear annihilation, apparently, in a cave, which was hard to believe, but the only story Kanaya offered. She was elegant, poised, but also charmingly awkward, with a tendency to misunderstand sarcasm. 

Rose finds her incredibly interesting. 

As one day bleeds into the next, she shows Kanaya to a spare bedroom, untouched for years, but kept in perfect condition thanks to her mother’s occasional fits of compulsive vacuuming. Kanaya thanks her profusely, and they design to meet for breakfast.

Somehow, in the next days, they settle into a routine around one another. They bond over a mutual appreciation for horror novels, dark colours, and an air of mystery. Rose is sure this isn’t normal, but she figures that the apocalypse is as good a reason as any to change thing up. Also, Kanaya is kind, and allows Rose this a perfect opportunity to practice socializing with peers. 

They are having dinner one night in a low-lit kitchen, when Kanaya inquires, “might you have anything stronger to drink?”

Rose sets down her glass of orange juice and pretends not to notice her own hand shaking as she does so. How silly, she thinks abstractly. They have a veritable trove of stronger things to drink. “Of course,” she finds herself saying automatically. 

Such is the joy of the thing, the trauma that haunts you, she reflects later: you will forget the most pertinent of details, the simplest of evasions, when it gets brought up. It would have been easy to say that there was no alcohol, that it had been a dry household, or that Rose herself had had it all to drink. She even could have pointed Kanaya to the kitchen cabinet, which likely still had at least one bottle of wine. Rose hadn’t checked; the corner still stank like her mother’s perfume. 

Instead, she found herself robotically leading Kanaya down to the basement cellar and bar. She hadn’t been in in weeks and stared at the door. 

“Is this where you store it?” Kanaya prompts kindly. “Rose, I in no way meant to pressure you into finding alcohol for us to enjoy,” she says and takes Rose’s hand in her own. It’s soft. 

Kanaya is still faintly glowing in the dim light of the hall. Rose drags her eyes to Kanaya’s. “My mother is in there,” she tells Kanaya and feels empty like the house around her.

“In there?” 

The door is closed and locked. Rose knows that Kanaya knows this, can see it. 

“She’s dead,” Rose says, her eyes fixed on a minuscule dent in the silvered surface of the industrial door. “I’m not sure how. She’s been dead for nearly two weeks.”

It’s not like in the novels, when it all comes spilling out now that the floodgates are open. Rose lets the words hang between them and can’t find the thread to tack up her next idea, to explain. She knows she is usually verbose, has all the right words for all the right situations and even the wrong ones. None of them are here now. It is just her, and her glowing stranger, and the door. 

“There is also lots of alcohol in the room,” Rose adds. It’s an afterthought. She has no intention of drinking any of it, and she hopes that Kanaya does not either. 

Kanaya takes her other hand in hers and holds it tightly. Rose looks up at her, and Kanaya says, “shall we burn it?”

“Burn it?” Rose repeats, finding surprise under the numbness. 

“If there is a sufficient amount of hard liquor, it should light very easily,” Kanaya conjectures. “Especially if we were to add some gasoline from your generator’s tank.”

Rose doesn’t understand. She blinks up at Kanaya wordlessly. Kanaya strokes her cheek gently with the back of her hand. “Don’t you think that it’s time that you left this place?” she asks.

Rose realizes, suddenly, like a metal curtain lifted off her eyes, that the past few weeks have been lived in a daze. She can’t remember the details of any of them. She’s been trying to live her entirely normal and boring day-to-day life, but in the process had forgotten the most important thing: there really is no normal day-to-day anymore. The apocalypse happened; her mother and most of the rest of the world are dead. The halls of this concrete mausoleum might not have changed, but everything else has.

A thought worms its way into her mind, staring at the slab of steel that forms a door, or is it a memory? There is a reason her house looks the way it does; there is a reason she has survived. The pieces are building a picture in her mind that she is not entirely sure she wants to see. 

“I have a cousin, I think,” Rose says, a non-sequitur only not, “who lives in Texas.”

“Do you know how to drive?” Kanaya asks. 

“Some,” Rose says. She’s read the driver’s handbook. That should be enough. “There’s a car in the garage.”

For the first time since the apocalypse, Rose is smiling. Kanaya smiles shyly back and squeezes both of her hands. 

“First, petrol,” Rose decides, and pulls Kanaya up the stairs behind her, leaving the powder keg and the body of her mother behind. 

The two of them ride off into a breaking pink dawn a few hours later, hands clasped over the gearshift and the sky in the rear-view mirror hazy with smoke.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!! I hope you enjoyed it :)) Please leave a comment if you did, it means a lot!!
> 
> you can find me on tumblr at [@everythingsdifferentupsidedown](https://everythingsdifferentupsidedown.tumblr.com).


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